Asia 2008

I'm still in Singapore, trying to buy a camera. I like the place a lot more after eating a beautiful meal in Little India: mutton Hyderabad, bhindi masala, naan, served on a banana leaf - enough for two. Two hippos. Last night I ate in Chinatown: sliced pig trotters with jellyfish, followed by a congee with abalone, fish, meatball and dried pig's intestine. Lovely.

I'm still in Singapore because my attempt to buy a camera has been delayed. I have found prices in at least ten stores, and returned to the best yesterday only to find that I could not buy at that price because it was a 'superduper' price that only the manager could sign off on (S$250 below standard quote), and he was absent. At least I know I got a good price. I'm buying a Canon EOS 400D with a Sigma 18-200 OS lens, with international warranty. The combination is much heavier than my current camera, but not as heavy as carrying two lenses, and I use the zoom a lot, as you can see from the animal portraits. I'm buying an SLR for better performance in low light/high ISO/fast shutter speeds; better lenses; filter flexibility; hotshoe attachment; faster focusing; RAW data. It's costing S$1450 minus the 7% VAT reclaim. To get to sterling, multiply by three and divide by eight. Do it in your head, right now, and help delay senility.

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In the Lonely Planet guide to Vietnam, one of the authors recounts a story in which his bike broke down in the countryside. A friendly soul helped him out and refused payment. His conclusion: this was the real Vietnam and the real Vietnamese, the people the tourists don’t see.

If you broke down in the countryside in Montana, someone would probably help you out. In my experience the highest proportion of people who are sincerely friendly and helpful is to be found in Canada, the United States (outside Manhattan) and rural Scotland. In Canada, you wouldn’t bother mentioning it in the guidebook. In Vietnam it’s worth mentioning, precisely because it is out of the ordinary. About 95% of the Vietnamese you meet as a tourist – and my sample size is very large – are brusque and charmless. There are heroic exceptions – I would want to mention people in Ninh Binh and Dalat in particular - but they are in a small minority of the people who deal with tourists.

The Vietnamese haggle as if at war, aggressively and without humour. If you don’t offer a price they are prepared to accept, they look at you as if you just spat your spleen at them. It makes no difference if you smile. (A lot of the Thais are out to get you too, and some can be just as charmless. But a good many are very ready with a smile, which makes the process of bargaining much easier.) The only code is: screw the customer; he’s a cretin; the more you diddle him, the greater the triumph. Try offering ten times the real price and see if he accepts. I don’t think this is directed to foreigners alone, although the Vietnamese are in general understandably nationalistic and xenophobic after over a millennium of Chinese rule and nasty wars with the French, the Americans and their imperialist aggressor lackeys (not to mention the Mongols, and China in 1979).

In England, if a bus driver tried to charge double the price, people would disapprove and someone would probably speak up. Occasionally you hear that some taxi-drivers rip off unsuspecting foreigners on the route from Heathrow to London; they are condemned as thieves. In Vietnam, when the same thing happens the other passengers will support the bus driver. Foreigners are, by tacit agreement, there for the taking.

In every country where there are tourists, people are out to get to the tourist dollar, but there are different ways of doing so. Just because you want to trade with someone doesn’t mean you have to treat them as an enemy.

Now, there is a strong selection effect here. Most of the people who talk to you as a tourist are selling cigarettes, books, sunglasses, drugs, transport or erotic experiences; but in fact four in every seven Vietnamese works in agriculture. But from the tourist’s perspective the touts are the real Vietnam, and a guidebook should be honest about it instead of burbling an apologia for the invisible.

This is not just my twisted opinion (and I should mention that I quite like the Thais, Malaysians and Singaporeans and very much like the Laos); almost every traveller finds the same thing.

To aver that the real Vietnam is what you don’t see, while what you do see is not real, is asinine (that Plato did it does not make it valid). You could use the same reasoning to assert that, at home, the Vietnamese have two heads, green skin and can fly. Not only is there no evidence for it, it contradicts the evidence; this is the sort of failure of inference on which superstitions (and religions) are built.

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After that, I'd better mention some good things.

Best Vietnamese restaurants: Nam Phương, Hanoi; the Temple Club, Saigon; Quán Ăn Ngon, Saigon; Cafe Can and Café 96, Hội An; the live fish restaurants on the beach at Hội An; Khanh Kat, Nha Trang.

Best beer: the pilsner at Le Lousiane, Nha Trang, head and shoulders above the rest. Honourable mention: Tiger, Heineken (brewed in Vietnam). Raspberries: everything else.

Best spot for a coffee: Highlands Coffee on Nguyen Hue in Saigon, from where you can see the Rex Hotel, the Hotel de Ville and the Municipal Theatre; Highlands Coffee, next to the Opera in Hanoi; anywhere on the lake in Ðàlạt; the posh hotel in Quy Nhơn.

I'm in Singapore feeling hungover and Eeyorish after saying or implying goodbye to all the others - Rita, Riaan, Alex, Andy, Graeme, John, Hannah, Amber, Aneil, Ashley, Sam, Hayley, Flora and Elisa - and checking into a depressingly crappy backpacker hostel. Most have already left the country. Once you get into the rhythm of travelling on your own it's easy, but immediately after spending 17 days in a crowd I feel desolate.

(A special na zdorovie, to Alex, my good-natured room-mate for 16 nights.)

Singapore has not grabbed me yet, although its inhabitants have struck me as being even more friendly and helpful than the Malaysians. It takes for ever to walk anywhere because you can't jaywalk. Except for cameras, the prices cause vertigo after Malaysia. The hotels are very expensive. I don't think I can afford to stay here for very long, so the only objective for the day is to choose where to go next: Sumatra, Java, Borneo, or back to the peninsula?

(It's now evening and it hasn't yet been achieved. I'm even considering flying straight back to KL, which I liked, and cogitating there. I spent the afternoon going to camera shops and having a Singapore Sling with Hannah and the Qlders at the Raffles Hotel. Except not really at the Raffles Hotel: they built a shopping mall around it in the 1990s, and the 'Long Bar' is therefore less than twenty years old. Its interior was a bit Berni Inn - fine in itself, but unfitting for a grand hotel. The cocktail cost S$25 - about £9. Incidentally I always used to think that the hotel was named after AJ Raffles, the 'amateur cracksman' of the EW Hornung stories; it's a shame it wasn't.)

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The real Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford, had a spice garden planted at the foot of the hill that is now Canning Park. Among the spices were nutmeg and cloves. Cloves originally came from Indonesia but Indonesia now has to import cloves because it makes so many clove cigarettes.

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In Malaysia I usually tried to eat Malaysian/Malay food. It's harder than it sounds, since there are more Chinese and Indian restaurants. A bit like Britain actually, although the two 'Indian' cuisines differ. It took me a while to realise that eating solely Malay was foolish: there were Indians here long before the Portuguese arrived in 1511, although most were brought over from Tamil Nadu by the Brits to work as servants or build railways. And there have been Chinese here for ever. Indeed, the primary reason that Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian Federation was that, with Singapore in the Federation, there was a small Chinese majority in the country - unacceptable to a Malay nationalist government. (Since the Chinese have procreated more slowly than the bumis, the latter are in a comfortable majority these days.) So Chinese and Indian food is as much Malaysian as Malay is. And Nyonya - eaten in Melaka and Penang - is a mix anyway.

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Time for another photo gallery. How about some more photos of Penang? The Qlders and I visited the Botanical Gardens and Penang Hill, which would afford great views over George Town and the Straits if the smog permitted. In the gardens we saw a few animals scuttling/swimming/hovering around.

The gardens and the hill are home to colonies of macaques. They have become used to humans, and have learnt to regard them as ready sources of food. They can be quite persistent, apparently, although those we met were well brought up.

I'm posting from Melaka, the old trading town that dominates the narrowest point of the Melaka Straits. The last couple of days have been hideously hot, but today promises showery relief. I feel rather bored of travelling today, but we're only here for a day so I'll head off shortly to a couple of museums instead of just sitting down and reading as I'd prefer.

We bussed yesterday from Kuala Lumpur, where we spent two nights. KL was hot and humid. It possesses fifty or more buildings above 25 storeys and more outlets of US chain stores than London does. So it's probably like Atlanta, except more muslim: most women cover their heads and quite a few are in burkas.

Before KL we spent a couple of nights in the Cameron Highlands. (Named after William Cameron, who discovered the plateau while surveying in the late nineteenth century. While the coast of the peninsula has been well surveyed for centuries, most of the interior was only surveyed in the twentieth century.) It's 1500 metres above sea level, and its specialities are tea and strawberries. This makes afternoon tea and scones a possibility, and they are on offer; I indulged gladly in a tea room that took me straight back to Yorkshire. A lot of other plants are grown under polythene; the area is an important source of agricultural produce for Malaysia.

In the Highlands we visited a tea plantation run by the Boh company, which is still owned by a British family.

In the lowlands the picking is now largely automated, but in the highlands the leaves are still picked by hand. The pickers come from Indonesia, Nepal and Bangladesh.

The picked leaves are left to wither. Then they are rolled in order to twist and break and withered leaf and expose its juices. The third stage is 'fermentation' (actually oxidisation). Then the leaves are dried for twenty minutes at 100 degrees C. Finally they are sorted. The best tea is made from large leaves. The lowest quality is tea dust; this goes into tea bags.

After visiting the tea plantation we went for a walk in the rain and in the jungle. It was warm work. After about an hour and a half we reached an area containing several buds and flowers of Rafflesia arnoldi, discovered by Raffles and Arnold in Sumatra in 1818. It is the largest flower in the world; this alien-spawn is a bud. The plant is parasitic.

They flower for only a couple of weeks, unpredictably. For the first week they are bright red, as here, and they don't smell of much. Then they darken and begin to stink of rotten meat, which attracts the flies essential to the plant's reproduction.

This is Hannah with a millipede. I managed to cope with it crawling on me for about two seconds.

Then we visited a waterfall. The water was muddy and uninviting, but three hydrophiles entered. We had been told that there were no leeches, but two people got little leeches on their feet. This is John, our Gruppenfuehrer.

Upon retracing our steps some of us had a go at blowpiping darts using the blowpipes that some of the local non-Malay bumiputra use to hunt. The blowpipes are about two metres long. It takes less blowing effort than you'd think.

And then we bussed off to a butterfly farm. This was great fun. First we were shown a number of large insects and other arthropods. This is Sam with some scorpions.

Hannah with a mantis.

A Malaysian horned toad, and a couple of lizards.

Then we wandered into the butterfly enclosure. It was well below the temperature at which the butterflies are active - cold, in fact - so they just sat torpidly in vast numbers. They only live for a few days, and quite a few had ceased to be.

The majority were Rajah Brooke butterflies, Trogonoptera brookiana, named by Alfred Russel Wallace after the first White Rajah of Sarawak. These birdwings have red heads and brilliant tooth-shaped flashes of green on the back of their wings.

I’m posting hurriedly from George Town, the capital of Penang, named after the chap who lost America. Penang is both an island and a state on the west coast of the Malaysian peninsula at the north end of the Malacca Straits. It was given to the East India Company by the Sultan of Kedah in 1786. He thought that the EIC would provide military defence in return; when the EIC declined, the Sultan tried to grab it back, and the EIC ended up renting the island off him. It was the first British base in Southeast Asia.

I’m on an organised tour heading towards Singapore. Along with the five Brits are two South Africans, four Australians, two Canadians and a German. Here are the Solihull sisters.

On the way we visited a floating market near Bangkok.

Most boats are paddled, but some puke acrid fumes over everybody.

Then we bussed to Kanchanaburi, where the famous bridge over the River Kwai was built. (Kwai rhymes with day and, like Avon, means river.)

There is a good museum dedicated to the building of the Burma railway. 100,000 people died building it – 80,000 of them Asians. 42,000 out of 70,000 workers from Malaya died. They were Malay, Tamil, and Chinese. 40,000 out of 90,000 Burmese workers died. 6,904 Brits died (captured in Singapore), 2,802 Australians and 2,782 Dutch. The Japanese kept accurate records of the dead westerners but did not bother with the Asians; not one Asian was buried in a grave in which his identity could be discovered. One thing I did not know was that the Japanese High Command gave orders that all prisoners were to be executed in the event of Allied landings in the vicinity. This order was carried out in Borneo and the Philippines.

While waiting for a train at Nakhon Pathom we visited Phra Pathom Chedi, where Buddhism was introduced into Thailand from Sri Lanka. The stupa is 120 metres tall. Around the cloisters are statues of Buddha in seventy-something positions.

Then we took an overnight train to Surat Thani and a ferry to the east-coast island of Ko Pha Ngan, home to the full moon party.

Fortunately we missed the party by a couple of days. We stayed in a fairly quiet bay on the northeast side of the island, a lovely spot.

We did very little for three days and four nights. At night if you walked through the waves the plankton phosphoresced. I did a lot of swimming; one thing they are not likely to mention in the brochures is the sea mites.

One day four of us went diving off Sail Rock. The fishing boats had come inshore the night before and it was blowing. There was good visibility, plenty of fish and some barracudas. I was sick ten times, which took the gloss off it a bit. Puking while floating in the sea requires a technique I haven't learnt so I had to do it underwater. The fish loved it.

We’ve missed all the football. It’s on at 2.45 am Malaysian time.

One of the most famous sites in Saigon is the Reunification Palace. An older palace stood here, but in February 1962, when even Diem’s own troops got fed up with him a couple of them bombed it, and it had to be demolished. The Independence Palace, as it was then called, was then built on the site.

As the presidential palace, it was the place to which the North Vietnamese army rushed when it entered Saigon on 30 April 1975. Senior government officials, including Big Ming, were waiting for them, and the soldiers took them straight off to the radio station. One of the most famous photographs of 1975 captured two NVA tanks crashing through the front gates of the palace. I remember it. Except it’s a fake memory: I saw the pictures and footage often enough in my childhood for it to feel like a real memory.

The building itself looks like a cross between a 1960s university library and the Council of Europe Building in Strasbourg. It’s also definitely a palace: there is a presidential receiving room, a VP receiving room; an ambassadors’ hall; a cabinet room; a 42-seat cinema; a helipad; a gaming room that looks like a Bond villain’s lair or the Moloko bar from A Clockwork Orange.

This is the President's receiving room:

And there are living quarters: a concrete cloister with a fountain in the middle and elephants’ feet and model boats by the walls.

Renamed the Reunification Palace, it is still used for official functions but is also a museum, preserving the building as it was in April 1975. There are old-fashioned telephones in pastel colours and formica tables.

Aside from the president’s office, which is rather dingy, it is a very successful example of architecture from a decade in which there were plenty of failures. Much more open to the tropical elements than your average faculty building in the Midlands, it’s airy in most areas, and beautifully decorated in a modern style. The ambassadors’ hall has an interesting lacquer painting covering one wall, depicting the great Vietnamese king-hero Lê Lợi.

There are three levels of balconies at the front. They form a Chinese character; added to the central pillar, they form another one. The plan of the building makes another.

The president’s library has the eclectic contents of a Hay-on-Wye bookshop: aside from a lot of Vietnamese books, Arthur Hailey; Henry James; CS Forester; Grahame Greene; Turkish Ceramics; Tennis World; Monuments de France.

Not wanting to be rebombed, Diem built a bunker under the palace. (It didn’t do him any good. In 1963 there was a coup. Diem retreated to the bunker and then ventured out to hide in Chơlơn, where he was found and murdered.) This was used as a war room, and there are fascinating maps of the war situation from 1975. There is also a radio station, telex office, switchboard, a spare bedroom, and a bombproof lower level. It looks like something from the Second World War.

At this stage I was following a small tour group. An American family, the father excepted, were remarkably ignorant. After being told several times, they could not grasp who was fighting whom, or who was communist (answer: no-one; ‘we’ are socialist).

Then we watched a video about how ‘we’ won – a logical impossibility after a civil war. Apparently the entire Vietnamese people were deeply saddened after the passing of Uncle Ho in 1969. Since half the country was fighting the other half at the time, I doubt it. Fortunately the video broke half way through.

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The War Remnants Museum mostly offers the usual shrilly mendacious exhibits, such as the hall of historical truth. I’ve gone about this before, but what particularly offends is the hypocrisy. For example, the exhibition cries that the South Vietnam regime breached the Geneva accords by singling out former Viet Minh fighters for reprisals. It doesn’t mention that under the same accords the Viet Minh were supposed to withdraw from South Vietnam, and didn’t. They also breached their undertaking to withdraw from Laos.

There is a further exhibit on the prisons of South Vietnam, and especially on the ‘tiger cages’ of Con Ðao, previously known as Poulo Condore. The French built the prison and kept political prisoners there. In the American War VC prisoners were kept in appalling conditions, were subjected to torture, given inadequate food and some were summarily executed. By all accounts Diem made Pinochet look like Mandela. This is worth recording, and the exhibit lists the forms of torture in some detail. But equally worthy of note is the fact that after unification, the Hanoi regime continued to use the same prisons in precisely the same way. (Equally important in modern Vietnamese history are the three hundred thousand or so évolués carted off to concentration camps for “re-education”; and the more than a million people who were so desperate to flee the Socialist Republic that they risked drowning and piracy to sail away.) The rope suspension torture that I mentioned in a previous post is described graphically; it takes gall to condemn this in public while inflicting it in private. Yet again, any sympathy is wiped out by the tendentious presentation.

However, a couple of the exhibits are worth seeing. One exhibit focuses on the ‘war crimes’ of the Americans, in particular the use of napalm and agent orange. It is an interesting question whether the wholesale deployment of these agents was a war crime, as the exhibit implies. I can’t remember any international criminal law, but just applying general principles of proportionality (the essence of ius in bello) gives three candidate reasons:

• That the aim was itself objectionable. The exhibit says that the aim was to return North Vietnam to the stone age. Although General Curtis LeMay famously used that exact phrase, I don’t believe that it was in any way an objective of the US forces.

• That the means were not sufficiently related to the goal. The real objective was to block the Ho Chi Minh Trails and starve the VC of supplies. This is an ancient and generally legitimate tactic. But did the chemicals help? Yes: they deprived the VC of the cover they needed to operate without being discovered. It was strategically rational.

• That the means used went beyond the minimum necessary to achieve the objective. The US military sprayed 77 million tons of defoliants on south Vietnam, including about 20 million tons of Agent Orange. A vast proportion of land under cultivation was sprayed or napalmed. A fifth of forest land was sprayed. Sixty per cent of mangrove forests disappeared; most of the area between Saigon and Cambodia was sprayed; and most of the DMZ too. Not to mention Laos, which suffered even more. I am not in a position to judge, but this must be an arguable case. The manufacturers knew about the dioxins when they sold it to the US government. If the presence and horrendous effect of the dioxins was known to the US government at the time then the case would be reasonably easy to make out.

There were, of course, other specific war crimes, notably the well-documented massacre at Mỹ Lai, burning of villages, free-fire zones, throwing prisoners out of helicopters, cutting off ears for the body count (which the British also did in the Falklands), and so on. But the question here is whether the use of the chemicals was per se criminal. A similar question must arise as to whether the indiscriminate Nixonian bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong was disproportionate. Neither question will ever be answered in court, any more than the similar questions over the carpet-bombing of Hamburg and Dresden.

No doubt this has been investigated further. I know that there were Congressional hearings into specific allegations of war crimes at the time, but I don’t know the outcome. That would require research, and I haven’t got time.

Agent Orange is a roughly equal mixture of two phenoxyls: 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and 2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4,5-T), chemical formula C8H5Cl3O3. They work by inducing growth so rapid that it kills the plant. The manufacturing process for 2,4,5-T releases dioxins such as n, 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin. (2, 4-D does not release dioxins and is still used as a herbicide.) The dioxins are associated with genetic defects and numerous cancers. In 1984 nearly 20,000 US veterans exposed to Agent Orange received a settlement of $180m from the manufacturers, including Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Australian, Canadian and New Zealand veterans also reached a settlement in 1984. A quarter of the children of Australian vets were found to be born with deformations. Korean veterans received $62m in compensation in 2006; this was a court award. Per capita, these are tiny numbers in relation to the damage caused. Vietnamese victims sued the manufacturers as well, in New York but the case was dismissed in 2006.

The US government has offered almost no assistance to veterans or their children in relation to Agent Orange syndrome, let alone to Vietnamese victims. Others cannot sue because the government enjoys sovereign immunity.

The Vietnamese government claims that 5 million people have been affected, but it is not clear how they arrived at this figure. In Cam Lo district, Quang Tri province (the DMZ), 4% of the population is said to be affected. The museum attributes every case of congenital blindness, peripheral neuropathy, spina bifida, birth malformations, cleft palates and even possibly Down’s syndrome to dioxins. But some children with such characteristics are born in any population, and you have to subtract that base rate from the rates observed in order to estimate the additional effect of dioxins. And you cannot say that any particular case is caused by dioxins. The museum doesn’t do any of that, so the numbers are overestimates, perhaps large ones.

Of the two million hectares of forest land sprayed, half are “yet to be rehabilitated”.

Much the best thing at the War Remnants Museum is an exhibition called Requiem. Organised by the Association of Photographic Artists of Saigon, a steering committee in Kentucky, Tim Page, Horst Faas, the Vietnamese Association of Photographic Artists and the Vietnam News Agency, it displays the work of the many insanely courageous photographers on both sides who died or disappeared during the conflict. They include such famous names as Robert Capa, Sean Flynn, Dana Stone and Larry Burrows. On the northern side, 76 photographers died. The exhibition includes several photos from Robert Capa’s last rolls of film, taken before he stepped on a mine, and good ones they are too, juxtaposing martial activities with agricultural.

The display was even-handed and all the more moving for it. Some of the pictures were magnificent. They included Larry Burrows’ extraordinary Time spread of a bombing mission in which the pilot died: “One ride with Yankee Papa 13”. Other highlights: Henri Huet’s superb photos of medics in the field; Robert Ellison’s photo of an exploding ammunition dump at Khe Sanh (published in Newsweek the week after he was killed); and Gilles Carron’s pictures of Hill 875 at Ðak To.

One thing I didn’t know is that the OSS – the forerunner of the CIA – helped to train the Viet Minh. Indeed the first American soldier to be killed was an OSS officer, killed by the Viet Minh by mistake. It makes sense: both were fighting the Japanese at the time (1945). It would not be the last time such a policy rebounded on the US.